Advertising in the field of e-commerce comprises several different types and modes of advertising, such as, for example, search based advertising, branding advertising, etc. One of two main types of advertising mechanisms or e-commerce based advertisements is the “Direct Response Advertisement,” such as Cost-Per-Click (CPC) in which cost accrues for clicks, or Cost-per-Action (CPA) in which cost accrues in the event of a particular action or conversion. The other major type of e-commerce based advertisement is “branding advertisement” in which cost accrues not based on clicks, actions or effectiveness, but based on the number of “impressions,” usually in lots of one thousand impressions, or Cost-per-Mille (CPM). An online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page. Each time an advertisement loads onto a user's screen, the ad server may count that loading as one impression.
There exist other methods that are classified according to how the display space of an online page is determined, and applies to both of the abovementioned “main types” of advertisements. These types of advertisements include keyword-targeting advertisements in which advertisements that are relevant to the keywords that the user has entered into search engines are shown along with the search results, or content-matching advertisements in which advertisements that are relevant to or match the contents of the web page are shown. In addition, in terms of the shape and style of the displayed advertisements, there exist certain categories of advertisements including, for example, text advertisements where advertisements are shown in the form of text, and display advertisements where advertisements are shown in the form of images or movies. Advertisements in the form of text, banners or images are shown to the user or audience in a fixed form, and advertisements in the form of movies or videos are looped, but the underlying principle remains the same in that all such forms of advertisements are switched according to certain conditions.
Specifically, for example, in the world of internet and e-commerce, the time that an advertisement is displayed will be the time that the web pages are displayed. In other words, a single advertisement would be shown to the user (over and over again in a looped manner in the context of video based advertisements) from the moment at which the page is displayed to the user until a time at which the user takes some type of action (e.g., moving/jumping to another page, reloading/refreshing the page, etc.). The amount of time before a user moves to another page or reloads the page varies, so the amount of time for which advertisements are displayed will also vary. If the page is shown for a long period, the advertisement will also be shown for a long period.
There exists a problem that the user or users' attention towards advertisements will not sustain for long period if the advertisement is uninteresting or irrelevant to them. Whether or not the user feels that an advertisement is interesting, relevant and engaging to them will usually be determined after several seconds. In other words, if the advertisement is uninteresting to the user, the user will only watch a few seconds of the advertisement, or none of it in the worst case. On the other hand, if the advertisement is interesting to the user, the user knows that he/she is interested in the advertisement by watching a mere few seconds of it. If a single advertisement is shown to the user in the advertisement space (e.g., by being looped through the duration of the user's page visit), it is not beneficial to the user in both cases: where the advertisement matches the user's interest, or where the advertisement does not match the user's interest. This is a wasted advertising opportunity for the publisher of the page, loss in efficiency or efficacy of the advertising for the advertiser, and overall loss in realizable revenue for both the advertiser and the publisher.
In general, the billing systems for online advertisements include: (1) in the case of direct response advertisements: costs accrued for clicks; (2) in the case of branding advertisements: costs based on CPM. For example, direct response advertisements and CPC are advertisements in which cost accrues for the advertiser when the user clicks on an advertisement and progresses or shifts to a website resulting from a click of the advertisement.
In scenarios where the publisher's media has long viewing times (e.g., a lengthy newspaper article) but the click through rate (CTR) is low. The clickthrough rate of an advertisement is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. A low CTR would mean that when selling direct response advertisements, useless advertisements that do not generate value are shown repeatedly to the user, thus reducing the overall advertising efficacy for both the publisher and the advertiser. This results in significant loss of opportunity.
Presently, billing for advertisements is predominantly according to CPM models, especially for branding advertisements. According to the CPM model, advertisers bid (sometimes through Real Time Bidding) for certain advertisement spaces as a function of 1,000 PVs (1000 page views). That is, the bid price is set for each 1000 PV count. Such a CPM model does not take into account critical factors such as an amount of time for displaying advertisements, etc. This results in the advertisers never knowing for what period of time (total number of seconds) the advertisement had a branding effect for the user, and in effect, blindly placing advertisements based on page views without any realization or consideration for what type of a branding effect or other ROI the online advertising campaign provides.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed invention.
In the drawings, the same reference numbers and any acronyms identify elements or acts with the same or similar structure or functionality for ease of understanding and convenience. To easily identify the discussion of any particular element or act, the most significant digit or digits in a reference number refer to the Figure number in which that element is first introduced (e.g., element 114 is first introduced and discussed with respect to FIG. 1).